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When you get buried, it takes time to dig yourself out.

It’s funny how certain changes in activity totally change your perception of time and its passing. I’m sure that part of my brain looks back at the previous post and tells me that it was only posted yesterday. The reality is of course, very different, and I awoke this morning with a terribly guilty feeling about the blog and how I’ve ignored it for absolutely ages. This won’t do, I thought, and resolved to post today come hell or high water.

My absence has been mainly due to a heavy freelance workload that started back in January. Regular readers may remember me including details of some of my freelance work back in October last year, follow this link to that post. I was talking about making big aircraft seat mock ups out of poly-board. Well, the next stage of these things involves taking the mock up to the next level, which includes all design, engineering and detail changes as the design progresses. These next level mock ups are invariably made out of MDF (wooden fibre board), are quite complicated, require a higher level of finishing and weigh a ton. This is what I’ve been doing and in this case they have required the insertion of a fully working seat mechanism into the furniture. As usual I can’t reveal any details in picture form as those of us who do work in this area are invariably tied by rather scary non-disclosure agreements. Due to the competitiveness of the industry and the amounts of money involved, confidentiality is paramount. I can however show you a picture of the seat mechanism as this is already a commercially available item. Lovely isn’t it.

Both of the mock ups I’ve been making required a lot of finishing in paint with various upholstered parts, so took quite a few weeks to complete working flat out. By the end of it I was exhausted both physically and creatively and I found it virtually impossible to get back to quiet drawing practise. So instead I built a new toilet under the stairs on the ground floor of my house. And now that’s done it’s time to start thinking about those little personal projects that keep the creative muscle working and drive my posts.

So what’s on the drawing board? Well, a number of things actually. Here is the first one. A couple of years ago I bought a two very old and battered crash helmets at a junk sale. They were made in the 50’s by a company called Centurion in Norfolk, England. What’s surprising about them is that they’re made from paper pulp and resin, so not that protective when you think about it. Needless to say they are pretty worthless these days but, I think they are nice objects in themselves and deserve a home. For ages I’ve been thinking about getting some of my images off paper and onto some other medium, so I’m going to paint the helmets with some cartoons. To spur myself on I went and purchased some sign writers paints and started preparing the first helmet for painting. It required much rubbing down and liberal use of high build primer spray to create anything like an even surface to work on. It’s in white primer now and so nearly ready for applying the final design. I’m currently working up some sketch ideas for this and I’ll reveal some of that work in the next post, which I promise, will be very soon.